Tag Archives: Marco Rubio

Well, ya, sure, you betcha! I just gotta say that I couldn’t be more pleased that my state, good old Minnesota, is the first one to show some good old-fashioned common sense! We’re the first one to say No! to the strange political circus that has everyone in thrall.

In his speech last night, Trump bragged that he’d won a bunch (it was just incredible; tremendous; America’s gonna be great again) and done no worse than second place otherwise.

Watching the antics at the GOP debate this past week, I realized something: the Comment Section has won; it’s taken over public discourse. I wrote recently about how the interweb, especially Twitter, has embedded into modern life. Now I realize just how true that is!

Think about this: Republican candidates for one of the highest and most important public offices in the world — the so-called Leader of the Free World — are exchanging third-grade insults about sweating and pant wetting.

New rule! From now on, if any political pollsters contact you in any way, make up a bunch of crazy stuff to tell them. Give them anything but your genuine opinions. In fact, go for the craziest options they offer!

Maybe if we make their polls so completely worthless they’ll stop and we can stop being subjected to an endless barrage of them every time there’s an election. I mean, have you ever really thought about what value polls have? Does how others vote matter to you?

At this point it’s hard to see how Donald Trump doesn’t get the Republican nomination. He did well in Iowa (24.3%) and won handily in New Hampshire (35.3%), South Carolina (32.5%), and Nevada (45.9%).

According to the Wiki GOP 2016 Primary page, as I write this, Trump has 32.72% of the votes cast so far, which gives him 82 delegates. The second-place pair, Rubio and Cruz, have about 20% of the votes each, which gives them 16 and 17 delegates, respectively.

The math is looking pretty good for Trump. It’s hard to see what slows down that train!

Do you know the story about the frog in hot water? A frog in a pot of cold water sits happy and content while the water is slowly brought to a boil. This happens so slowly that the frog doesn’t notice… until it’s too late and frog legs are on the appetizer menu.

As with most such tales it may not bear close scrutiny, but as a metaphor for the human condition it fits a certain behavior rather well. We can sometimes remain blissfully unaware of small — but dangerous — changes around us… until it’s too late.

Here we go again! Political mechanics (rather than celestial mechanics, quantum mechanics, or auto mechanics) brings the Silly Season of a presidential election around once more. Tonight, in Iowa, the results of the first of the Primaries will give us the first clues whether He Who Must Not Be Named gets traction.

The social mechanics, along with technology, seems to make this election cycle unlike any seen in American politics. Despite a common assertion, the world (society, really) does evolve and change!

There is a bit of delicious schadenfreude with regard to the mainstream (“establishment”) Republican party scrambling to correct for The Donald. The GOP spent years training their electorate to respond to noise and nonsense; now they’re stuck behind an interloper cuckoo bird who’s a master at noise, nonsense, and (worst of all) media.

Between the chirping Donnie Boy and the incoherent lipsticked pit bull, it’s quite an entertaining show. Of course, no one will actually vote for the guy, right? Those big crowds just turn out to see the show, right? They’ll never show up at the actual caucus…

Washington (D.C.) is the expected epicenter of an approaching patch of extreme weather, an historic storm that is, in large part, due to the damage our modern society has done to the environment. And utterly without irony, there’s going to be a big snow storm there, too.

The crazy weather does seem suited to the craziness going on in politics. As with climate change due to the increase of CO2, the flow of other pollutants into public discourse has changed the social environment.

Well, here we are in 2016, a Presidential election year, and — man, oh man — it’s going to be a weird one! High waters from several rivers seems to be converging to form a flood unlike any we’ve seen in modern politics. And while that’s kind of fascinating from a sociology perspective, as a citizen some of it seems kind of scary.

As I write this, actual rivers are flooding Midwestern cities in the USA, but the rivers I have in mind are reality shows, the interweb, and our social environment (where global unrest and terrorism is a primary topic). The flood here is a lack of sense, nuance, and thoughtfulness.

I’ve been watching the cable news a lot lately, and it fills me with dismay. I’m seeing coming to fruition a crop that I’ve been warning about for over 40 years. I’ve referred to it as the Death of a Liberal Arts Education.

As this crop of useless weeds chokes the life out of the nutritious and necessary political and social fauna and flora, I find that we’ve arrived at an even greater loss: Utter Dialectic Failure!